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So I recently decided after losing my O’pen, that I “needed” a AAA light with a clip to replace it. The Lumintop Tool was the chosen host due to having a clicky and a nice matte black Type III anodizing, same as the O’pen before it.

First, a flurry of ordering and waiting for bits to arrive, by far the longest process…

To start, the host was opened up, the driver and XP-G2 were removed. The tailspring was shortened due to the extra height of the ATTiny.

Next up, a combination of wight’s 12mm FET+7135 10440 driver board the MTN-10DD kit, an ATTiny13 and a 7135 from RMM’s shop becomes an impossibly small FET+7135 driver. Note the red line on the driver: an extra jumper wire needed to be soldered for the 7135 to work.

Some filing/sanding is required to make the driver fit into the pill and lock into the cutouts to prevent rotation. A slot was cut into the pill for future access.

The BAT+ strap being quite thick and difficult to work with was shaped, pressed flat, soldered and sanded down for an extra ~0.3mm as the battery otherwise protrudes and prevents contact with the tailcap.

Next up was reflowing that tasty 4000K Nichia 219C from Cutter with my super advanced reflow setup That thing that looks a lot like a hot air tool is just random piece of metal used to hold down the star.

The process taken is fairly simple. Heat up and wet star with excess solder, scrape the solder flat using the edge of the chisel tip, do the same with the LED. Coat star with a little bit of flux. Place star on heat resistant surface, position LED, crank up the power on the soldering station, heat the star until the LED reflows.

To help dissipate heat, some copper wire (It’s amazingly hard to find copper sheet locally) was packed into the pill and then filled with solder to act as extra thermal mass to reduce heat sag in turbo.

The pill is assembled and due to not having a ready supply of Kapton tape and the real possibility of a short, an insulating frame is cut out of some plastic packaging.

Last but not least, Toykeeper’s (very well documented) BLF-A6 firmware is programmed in after some tweaking of the modes and battery values to suit. One nice thing about the ATTiny being on the battery side is that the SOIC clip can go straight into the head for programming.

For reference, the values for battery voltages for my chip are (Using a lab supply and DMM to check):

It appears that the voltage to value relationship is linear, just taking the values for 4.2v and 2.7v and plotting the rest should yield adequate results for the battery warning.

Less than 2 years ago I would never have envisaged anything more than buying a different LED or driver from one of the Asian online outfits, certainly there were no decent AAA sized options available. In short, BLF has been amazing!

Moon mode works with PWM 1 and uses 2.73mA, which should be sublumen.
Turbo uses 2.70A (thanks to the low vF of the 219C) which should give about 840 LED lumens according to djozz’s testing.
(i.e. almost a 1000:1 ratio of brightness can be called at will)

Wow testedandbaked, you did the almost perfect Tool-mod with the newest led and the best driver (almost, perfect would be AAA compatibility too). I'm jealous of your skills, I can do a lot but not programming/flashing drivers, you master every aspect of modding and used it all.

Holy schmoly, what a mod. In the Book of Luke is said: “… it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man ….” Well, if I ever need a camel on the other side of a needle, you’re the go-to person. You describe it like anybody can do this, but this is far beyond the limitations of my eyesight. Awesome! One tiny remark. When I need an insulating piece of plastic that size, I use self-adhesive hole-reinforcing rings. Bigger rings I (also) cut out of a piece of plastic packaging.

Thanks all for the wonderful comments. I didn’t quite expect so much praise
This mod is very much only possible as a result of the works going on at BLF. Buying PCBs made by BLF members, flashing firmwares developed “in-house” and well-documented testing to back up our choice of emitter.

djozz wrote:

Wow testedandbaked, you did the almost perfect Tool-mod with the newest led and the best driver (almost, perfect would be AAA compatibility too). I’m jealous of your skills, I can do a lot but not programming/flashing drivers, you master every aspect of modding and used it all.

Thanks for testing out the 219c for us! In theory, AAA compatibility is possible… you would need to stack the original boost driver on top and wire the one free pin of the ATTiny to a transistor (?) to shut off the boost circuit when battery voltage is above 1.8v and turn it on when below. For PWM control, wire either the FET or 7135 control in parallel with the boost circuit. Finally, as the ATTiny can’t work with such low voltages, you must use the output of the boost to power the ATTiny. Of course, the voltage reading will be off so you would use the final free pin to read the true battery voltage. On the software side, you would have to put all that extra detection logic into 1k of memory. I dare someone to do it J)

Programming is the easy part; I don’t even know how to code. You will need a usbasp programmer and SOIC clip, had for a few coins on fleabay. Connect everything together then download AVRDUDESS (AVRDUDE with a nice gui), write the correct fuse bits (Low:0×75, High: 0xfd for BLF-A6, probably others too), download a .hex file from Toykeeper’s repo, select and hit Program. To tweak, get Atmel studio and the .c source file, change a few numbers, press F7 to build and flash the resultant .hex file. Not as hard as you think.

MRsDNF wrote:

Djozz said it perfectly. What an orsm effort. Hats of to you. Your not my neighbor are you?

I could be, though with 3 million people in Melbourne, the chances are fairly slim

Henk4U2 wrote:

Holy schmoly, what a mod. In the Book of Luke is said: “… it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man ….” Well, if I ever need a camel on the other side of a needle, you’re the go-to person. You describe it like anybody can do this, but this is far beyond the limitations of my eyesight. Awesome! One tiny remark. When I need an insulating piece of plastic that size, I use self-adhesive hole-reinforcing rings. Bigger rings I (also) cut out of a piece of plastic packaging.

“Have you forgotten about all those who called you a Bringer of Woe and hunted you like an animal?”
“Normal humans don’t go around killing people and burning towns!”
“Don’t worry. I’ll go with you! So you just follow me and no arguing, okay?”
“Humans m

In a failed dedoming attempt, the 219C turned into a deep blue LED :_(
Therefore I dedomed my remaining spare with a different method and reflowed it onto the Sinkpad, which due to carelessness, was cooked by excess heat.
Finally, the dedomed spare was moved onto the original MCPCB. As it stands, there is no DTP so the LED turned blue and emitted some mystery smoke that hung around in the reflector within about 2 seconds when 2.9A (this LED seems to have an even lower Vf :p) is pumped into it, but not at 2.4A. Fortunately, the LED was not damaged in that short burst but lesson learned, always go DTP to prevent overheating at high current. Now I wonder if there’s a kind soul willing to sell me a 10mm DTP star in Australia…

I updated my 4000K 219C with a 5000K model on a Sinkpad. The tint is a more neutral white, which is preferable to the warm white of 4000K. With the Sinkpad, there is no problem with blue shift or smoke driving it at full tilt. 2.80A is actually an underestimate as the light is visibly brighter when shorting the multimeter leads.

Now that you have tasted these crazy high output from a AAA light, you have to test out the XP-L V6 3D you did prefer the 5000K Nichia to the warmer one and the 3D is very close to the 5000K but it is more efficient at least at start, but the Nichia probably can sustain a higher output for longer with its lower Vf at turbo.
But if you manage to fit 22awg or even fatter 18awg wires, at start you should be looking at well over 1000 lumens :bigsmile: from that tiny light. Of course dropping like a stone but i never get tired of that much light from a such a tiny light.

EDIT hmm, i forgot about that the Tool uses a switch, that could limit max amp a bit from twisty AAA’s.

If you need a 10mm sinkpad, you can always cut or sand down a 16mm noctigon, i used that before i even knew about the 10mm sinkpads.

Great light! I will try to copy if I get back to doing SS-5039s. (But I am not keen on programming my own chips. After a hundred or so computer languages and systems, it isn’t fun anymore.) It is almost an A6 that fits on a keychain.
This is the light of the future. Flashlights will continue to get smaller and brighter.

—

Flashlight designers should look at lighthouses and pottery.
这些谁设计的手电筒应该看灯塔，以及在陶器。

To remove the pill, reflector and glass, you first take off the head. Looking into back of the head, there is the battery contact board with two holes for unscrewing the pill. Use something with two ends that can fit in the holes (e.g. tweezers or needle-nose pliers) and twist counterclockwise. Keep going until the pill is unscrewed. The reflector and glass are held in by the pill and will just fall out. Be careful not to touch the inner surface of the reflector.

Removing the tail end is very similar; unscrew the aluminum retaining ring, then push out the other parts of the switch by pressing on the button.